Bob Switzer, Invented Day-glo Paint With Brother

OBITUARIES

August 30, 1997|The New York Times

Because Bob Switzer fell off a loading dock as a teen-ager six decades ago, Allied troops were not accidentally bombed by their own planes during World War II, boxes of Tide detergent glow on supermarket shelves and black light is big at rock concerts.

Mr. Switzer, who died Aug. 20, and one of his two brothers invented fluorescent dyes, paints and penetrants that today are marketed under such names as Day-Glo and Magnaflux. Mr. Switzer, 83, died of Parkinson's disease at his home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, said his daughter, Ann Switzer Swander.

During the Depression, Mr. Switzer was attending the University of California at Berkeley on a scholarship and had a job unloading crates of food from rail cars for the Safeway grocery store chain when he fell and hit his head on a rail.

Months later, he awoke from a coma, his vision blurred. The family doctor recommended a darkened room during recuperation, which led to an interest in ultraviolet light, said his youngest brother, Fred.

One day in 1934 Mr. Switzer, who was then 20 and had regained his health, and the middle brother, Joseph, who was 18 and a chemistry student at Berkeley, took a black light into the storeroom of their father's drugstore looking for naturally fluorescent organic compounds.

Soon they envisioned brightening Joseph's amateur magic act and started mixing fluorescent compounds with shellac in the family bathtub. Their mother quickly ordered them to move the tests out of the house.

Their experiments yielded the first fluorescent paint, which they applied to a mask and headdress, creating for an audience in a darkened auditorium the illusion that a dancer went one way while her head floated in another direction.

``They immediately realized the economic potential in entertainment and that there would be other opportunities,'' Brian Switzer, Robert Switzer's son, said.

Soon the brothers were in Cleveland creating all sorts of products, including bright fabric panels that troops in North Africa used to identify themselves as friendly to Allied dive bombers. The material also allowed warplanes to operate at night from aircraft carriers in the Pacific, a capability not enjoyed by the Japanese navy, whose planes had to land on their carriers before nightfall.

The brothers developed fluorescent inks that bombardiers used during blackouts and fluorescent penetrants to find hidden flaws in machined parts, such as engine pistons and rockets' liquid oxygen tanks.

After the war, the two older brothers created their own company in Cleveland, which they eventually named Day-Glo Color Corp., and their ``coldfire'' fluorescents brightened everything from swimsuits to Tide boxes to Hula-Hoops to traffic cones. They also developed fluorescents for the fire retardants that aerial tankers drop on forest fires, allowing the next plane to know where its load is not needed.

Fluorescents differ from ordinary paints in how they are affected by light waves. Ordinary paint absorbs some of the spectrum from white light and reflects the rest; thus, red paint absorbs blue and green wavelengths and reflects red.

Fluorescent paint, however, absorbs energy from short wavelength light (including ultraviolet light) and then re-emits the energy by converting it into photons of longer wavelength. Thus, ultraviolet light goes in and its energy is converted into visible light emitted by the chemicals in the paint, creating the bright fluorescent quality.

Lawrence A. Caughlin, a former Day-Glo executive, said that Mr. Switzer ``was a serious, unassuming man who despite his wealth often wore the same checked coat with pants that didn't match and a bow tie, and he didn't care.''

Mr. Switzer was also scrupulous about complying with environmental laws, often spending more money than was required to meet the legal minimum standards for pollution control, Tom Gray, the company's longtime counsel, said.

Mr. Switzer's brother Joseph died in 1973. In 1985, with no one in the family interested in the complex chemistry needed to help the business grow, Mr. Switzer retired and Day-Glo was sold, with part of the proceeds being used to create the Robert and Patricia Switzer Foundation, which finances the Switzer Environmental Fellowships and a related program that are administered by the San Francisco Foundation and the New Hampshire Community Foundation. In the past 11 years, about 200 fellows, most of them graduate students in environmental sciences, have received $10,000 grants.